Investment risk. Scribd is a small company, and putting a whole battalion of developers on a PDF to HTML5 conversion for half a year without even knowing whether that'll turn out to be possible (as in, good enough for 10,000,000 documents) is a scary move. That being said, check out our upcoming engineering blog for technical details about how we convert to HTML5 now!

"putting a whole battalion of developers on a PDF to HTML5 conversion for half a year without even knowing whether that'll turn out to be possible"

The Google pdf viewer seems good enough to me. It'll be interesting to see what you can improve on that.

Actual pdf readers like Preview seem good enough to me. I don't understand why I would need to take a PDF and view it as HTML.

I do see the value for formats like .pptx where I may not have a reader, but PDF is already a "lowest common denominator" like HTML.

I've occasionally been thankful for Google's PDF conversion. PDF isn't a lowest common denominator - there are computers without that capability (kiosks and terminals, for example). What's more, PDF viewers can be pretty heavy, especially for fancy documents, and their browser integration tends to suck even when it exists.

Sure, I like reading my PDFs with evince, but sometimes HTML is just preferrable.

Downloading a separate file and then launching an external application is obnoxious, particularly when it creates a new window. I know a lot of people who actively avoid and refuse to click on PDF links for that reason.

I've always thought that the best solution would be for browsers to just include PDF rendering support alongside HTML. PDF is a popular enough format on the web that it should really be handled by the browser as a core feature, not by some add-on or external application. I really liked Apple's Safari for this reason (although I dumped it for Firefox because of AdBlockPlus).

Done right it would seem like perhaps some of the higher-level rendering layers of the browser could be reused, regardless of whether the underlying content was PDF or HTML. (In fact isn't this how Safari works, with Quartz?)

No offense to Scribd, but I'd like to see the need for their service go away by in-browser support for progressively-downloaded PDFs.

In ChromeOS you'll need some kind of pdf viewer that runs in the browser. And not needing a native app is pretty nice in general in terms of bookmarking possibilities.

Doesn't ChromeOS load PDFs into the Google PDF viewer?

Well, two of many reasons are adobe is run by morons incapable of making a secure or performant product. Unless you missed the wave of acrobat exploits? 'Cause my gf's laptop sure didn't :(

Removing yet another plugin from your browser shrinks the attack surface, and as a side benefit, reduces use of one of the worst IMO bits of web tech.

stay tuned.

html >> images

The change isn't as great as it seems (at least at first). Right now their setup probably looks something like this:

PDF -> Internal Representation -> Flash viewer

In principle they should only need to change to

PDF -> Internal Representation -> HTML5 viewer

That alone should make a huge different in terms of time needed.

Most things certainly are simple in principle.

I'm not saying it's trivial... just that they are not exactly restarting from scratch.

Never having done something similar myself, I would expect the hardest part to be correctly parsing the original PDFs and dealing with the varyiaty of PDF generators out there.

Small in size but still one of the top200 (150?) web sites.

156

http://www.quantcast.com/scribd.com

I'll believe it when I see it.

To me, this feels like desperation. It seems a little late to stop depending solely on Flash. Also, why not say that you're moving after you partially move? The companies I admire the most brag about distant features the least.

"Distant features"? It's launching tomorrow.

Yes, but that is 86400 seconds from now ..

Performance maybe - but it's hard to imagine any HTML5 implementation to be slower than Flash is. Also, HTML5 isn't arriving on IE for some time yet, and even then it may take years for the general public to update to something that can render HTML5 properly.

I wouldn't use any of the more complex/less-supported features of HTML5 on any live site today, that's for sure.

Really?

I always thought that Flash was quite performant compared to browser-based Javascript. Can you point to any benchmarks?

Flash performance varies widely. Flash on Mac OSX is generally regarded as terrible, while Flash on Windows isn't as bad.

If by generally regarded, you mean literally blows chunks... ffs, VLC is open source and it performs better on my macbook pro. Adobe is too incompetent even to copy freely available code.

Clearly video and PDF display are two different animals. Saying that performance blows on video and then using VLC as a comparison for JavaScript vs ActionScript performance is completely besides the point.

Yeah, sure, "blows chunks" is a perfectly fair assessment. I was just trying to be somewhat diplomatic.

I work with a hardcore Mac zealot and it's a running joke in the office that he will complain about Flash performance every single day.